Since the beginning of the Internet phenomenon, the general population has been intrigued with its popularity and the effect it will have on traditional businesses. Even though powerful in concept, the Internet is nothing more than a vast volume of computer users connected via public accessed Wide Area Networks (WAN). Such a digital network links millions of people to freely move data between each other allowing communication, information distribution, entertainment, etc. The most similar comparison to such a vast communication network is the world telephone network. The only difference is that instead of telephones one would use a digital computing device (computer) and instead of analog audio (voices) parties would communicate in a digital format over digital connection. So, if you could convert your analog voice into digital format, send it over telephone lines and then convert it back into analog format at the destination point, you will have the general concept of the INTERNET (there are now digital telephones allowing such communications). So in a nutshell, the Internet allows people to communicate (transport) digital information between each other thousands of miles a part. The computer's job is to translate digital and analog information such as text, images, full motion video, audio, etc. back and forth for humans to understand.
To move digital content from one point to another is similar to moving water through pipes used in any house. Water pipes are like the digital line(s), water is like the digital content and sinks installed in different parts of the house are like computers. Like moving water in the pipes, the amount of data to be moved over a specific period of time over digital lines is limited by its size (the technical term is bandwidth). If there is a need to move a specific amount of data from one point to another within a specific period of time, one would have to engineer such a line with appropriate bandwidth (many businesses design such configurations to avoid delays in data delivery). That means that if the bandwidth of a network line would stay constant (as is the case with standard telephone lines) and the digital content to be transported over the line increases, the time to move it would increase also. However, if the same digital content could be made smaller (compressed) the time to move it would decrease. This is the main reason for such aggressive efforts in the development of digital compression techniques. The main objective of shrinking (compressing) the digital content is to reduce the transmission time over limited bandwidth network line linking each individual computer user.
Since the Internet provides the foundation to move such digital content across the world in a fraction of a second, one can now understand the power of such commerce. It is clearly obvious that the Internet could have a tremendous impact on industries creating and managing such digital content. Music and video industries are scrambling to capitalize on many opportunities the Internet offers but at the same time they drag their feet allowing digital distribution of music and video. They fear to lose control over their digital content to piracy and unauthorized content distribution to millions of people worldwide without compensation.
The opportunity to cash in on this lucrative and highly desirable business of digital compression technologies provoked major companies like AT&T and Microsoft to step in and ride the growing popularity of digital music distribution. A few years back, there were no companies working on the digital compression techniques. Today they are as follows:
Name of the companyCompression codeAT&Ta2bMicrosoftReal NetworksReal AudioLiquid AudioLiquid AudioPublic DomainMPEG
Each of these compression schemes offers unique benefit to the end user. Most of them average a compression ratio of about 1 to 12. Higher compression reduces the audio quality, where lower compression improves it. An end user may download the standard software player from the company's Website at no cost. Real Network has been able to penetrate the Internet users with their players making them the largest in the main stream Internet market.
Having such ability to compress music and video content, end users can now either stream (play music files from remote location (Websites) in real time without the need to copy it onto local drive) or download music files at 10 to 20 times the speed. As digital music files are shrinking with the advances of compression algorithms many new opportunities themselves are on the hardware, software and Web-based services arena.
Today, any computer user plugged into the Internet can listen to audio files or watch motion video from remote Websites. As the compression schemes improve and network bandwidth increases, the quality of audio and video delivery over the Internet will improve. Compression advancements gave birth to hardware development for portable music player devices. These new devices offer digital storage of compressed music files and playback. Unlike the traditional CD's these players are equipped with removable or embedded media capable of storing vast number of tracks. Now, owners of such devices can make their own music compilations from original CDs or downloaded via the Internet.
The main problem in providing the full benefit of these technologies is that there is a missing element to make such changeover seamless for the user. Any user can purchase multiple software or hardware portable players to play music under different compression schemes, but there is no easy way to convert his existing library of CDs into the desired compression schemes. The present invention solves the missing element to provide an easy way to compress music and video file on demand and to store the compressed files at a remote site for later retrieval.